Right now, teachers are getting pulled in two completely opposite directions on tech use, particularly with artificial intelligence.

Your admin may want you to use it to plan lessons, save time, stay current. And on one hand, it does save time, and we want to take advantage of the tools we've got, especially if theyre free.

But a lot of us also have this nagging feeling that something about it isn't quite right, and we can't always articulate what exactly is bothering us. Is it what it's doing to student thinking? The privacy stuff? The way it's being pushed on us as inevtiable? The environmental cost?

Most of us are just absorbing that tension on our own, and trying to keep our heads above water. Instructional decisions about AI are often made as a series of small decisions in isolation, without ever getting the time or space to actually figure out where we stand, what we value, what's best for our specific students in our specific teaching contexts..

You're invited to carve out some time and space for that with me next week.

Stay Human: Finding Your Ethical Stance on AI as an Educator is a two-day virtual training I'm running on July 13th and 14th, built around the questions that actually keep teachers up at night: not which tools to use, but whether to use them at all, and if so how much, and what it means for your students and for our society.

REGISTER HERE: https://courses.truthforteachers.com/courses/stay-human

Day one is about you as a teacher. We'll map the full spectrum from AI enthusiast to conscientious objector, work through how AI actually functions so you can evaluate it with clear eyes, and get into a six-stance framework for making consistent ethical decisions about your own practice. Rather than a rulebook, you'll have a way of thinking you can apply every time something new comes along and the pressure ramps back up.

Day two shifts to your students. We get into what the research actually says about AI and learning, why productive struggle matters and what happens when students shortcut, and what it looks like when AI pushes kids to think harder instead of thinking for them. You'll also walk away with 2 complete student mini-units on AI literacy, yours to use in the fall.

By the end of both mornings, you'll have a personal AI philosophy, a classroom policy grounded in your own values, and up to seven hours of PD credit.

We meet 10am to 12:30 Eastern on Monday July 13th and Tuesday July 14th, so we're done by lunch both days with time in between sessions to let the ideas marinate.

Recordings are included, so even if something comes up, you won't lose access, and if you're listening to this too late, you can still take advantage of the training.

If you're a member of 40 Hour AI, this is included in your membership at no extra cost. If not, the early bird price for stay human is $47 through July 8th, then it goes up to $97.

One more thing: if you're a curriculum director, instructional coach, or administrator and you're thinking your whole staff needs this conversation, I also offer this training in-person and virtually for school and district PD sessions. Just reach out to [email protected] and I'll create a customized package for you.

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2 options for joining us on July 13th and 14th:

Free for 40 Hour AI members

$47 early bird pricing for non-members until July 8th (reg. price is $97)

Everyone has an opinion about AI in classrooms right now, but very few of those opinions are grounded in what we actually know about how kids learn. In this episode, I sit down with Erin Mote, CEO and founder of InnovateEDU and co-founder of Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School, to cut through the noise and talk about what the evidence actually shows about AI as a learning tool.

This isn't a conversation about ChatGPT, cheating, whether to ban devices, or what kids are doing with AI at home on their own time (which are separate topics worthy of their own discussion).

We're talking specifically about AI-powered tools designed for classroom use that are being pitched to your district and showing up in your school, and whether they hold up when measured against what we know about how kids learn.

In this episode you'll hear Erin share her thoughts on:

• Why "good enough" consumer tech is not good enough for students, and what to look for in tools that are actually built around learning
• The difference between sycophantic AI and Socratic AI, and why it matters for student outcomes
• What the early research is showing about AI as a learning tool, including what's promising and what we still don't know
• What to ask for and advocate for at the school and district level so these decisions aren't made without you

If you've been feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change and unsure what to actually do, this episode will leave you with more clarity, and more confidence in what you already know about how kids learn.

Listen in. Or read the transcription here.

Teaching gives you a lot of opportunities to look back and wish you'd done it differently, and most of us carry those regrets way longer than we need to.

In this episode, I'm sharing what I learned from Daniel Pink's book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, and how his research applies to the unique kind of regret that teachers carry.

I'll walk you through the four categories of regret most people have, the difference between "if only" and "at least" thinking, and a three-step process for actually processing a regret instead of just ruminating on it at 2 a.m.

I'll also share the line from Pink's book that hit me hardest, the one that completely changed how I think about looking back:

If you know what you truly regret, you know what you truly value. Your regrets aren't proof you've failed this year. They're a map of what you care about. If you've been carrying something from this school year and you're not sure what to do with it, this episode is for you.

Listen in. Or read the transcription here.

Food writer Bee Wilson has been in classrooms across the UK, and what she's discovered is startling: many children have completely lost their sensory connection to real food.

They know the peach emoji but not the fuzzy feel of actual peach skin. They recognize mint from shampoo but have never smelled a fresh mint leaf.

When asked where food comes from, kids used to say "the supermarket." Now they say "mommy's iPad."

This slow shift is revealing a new gap in child development that affects how kids observe, describe, and engage with the world around them.

In this episode, Bee explains what's lost when children grow up disconnected from real food. And she explains what can happen when you put fresh produce in their hands and simply ask: What do you see?

Bee shares how these lessons build scientific observation skills, spark rich oral language, and get even the most reluctant writers eager to put words on paper. Kids speak in vivid similes and metaphors. They notice details they've never noticed before. And, teachers report some of the most meaningful classroom experiences of their careers.

Bee is the co-founder of TastEd, a charity offering free sensory food education resources now used in over 1,800 UK schools: tasteeducation.com

She's a fascinating guest sharing practical ways any teacher can bring this into their classroom, including a simple lesson you could try tomorrow.

Listen in. Or read the transcription here.

You've been holding it together with caffeine and adrenaline, but your nervous system has been white-knuckling it for ten months and hit a breaking point.

It's time for The Reset.

This is something brand new I'm offering for the first time: an at-home restorative retreat for teachers happening June 26-28th.

It's intended to be like a real retreat experience, just held somewhere you don't have to pack a bag for and deal with travel expenses.

Because The Reset is FREE.

Over the weekend of June 26th-28th, I'll guide you through the practices that actually move the needle for teacher burnout.

I've created videos for morning stretching and restorative yoga, audio for forest bathing (which is a mindful nature practice you can do anywhere outside), breathwork, and more.

There are also nervous system mini-seminars where I explain what's actually happening in your body during a stressful school day, why you feel the way you feel, and how to send the all-clear signal so you can calm down again. And no worries about being tied to a screen: these are designed to be listened to while you're walking, going for a bike ride, gardening, or whatever you like to do!

If you're thinking, "I don't know if I can actually take a real break if I'm at home with all these distractions," I've planned for that.

Everything is on-demand and completely optional.

There's no Zoom call you have to show up to, no message forums to keep up with, no schedule to follow.

I'll release videos of guided experiences each day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the retreat portal. Pick and choose whatever you'd like to do, in any order you want.

You basically get to design your weekend retreat, with my resources there to guide you through activities and spark inspiration.

Here's how it works:

• Sign up for FREE to join The Reset At-Home retreat from June 26-28. All the content releases over that weekend, and is removed on Sunday night at midnight PT. I want you to actually prioritize your own wellbeing: mark your calendar, and carve out time for YOU.
• If you want to keep all the resources permanently, opt in for the $29 Anytime Access pass. You can take your own retreat whenever it's convenient, and do mini resets during the school year. Additional bonus practices and resources will drop on Monday for those who get the Forever Access Pass.

One more thing. If you have a teacher friend who's running on fumes right now, send this this ep, or the link to sign up: https://courses.truthforteachers.com/courses/reset

Better yet, plan to do The Reset together! Hang out at your friend's house in your comfiest loungewear, pick some of the activities to experience, have a healthy lunch, maybe even take a nap on the couch before diving back in for a final restorative session before dinner. You can make this at-home retreat anything you want it to be!

Join us for The Reset HERE

If you'd also like an in-person retreat, I've got two of them happening this summer (June 12-14 in eastern PA, and 24-26 July in the Asheville/Charlotte NC area). And, there's a Labor Day weekend retreat and fall restorative retreat I'm holding for everyone (not specifically teachers, so you can bring a non-teacher friend or partner). ​Get all the details about in-person retreats HERE.

Most of us are walking around in a low-grade state of fight-or-flight all the time, and we don't even realize it. It looks like the tight jaw in the morning, the exhaustion that doesn't lead to sleep, or the feeling of being on edge even on a good day. These are signs of a nervous system that never got the signal that it's safe to come down.

In this episode, I'm sharing a lesson from my new free video course called Everything is Terrible: An Anxiety Toolkit for the Age of Doomscrolling. It's a five-lesson toolkit for people who care deeply about the world and are quietly exhausted by the weight of it. Each lesson is a standalone tool you can use when you need it.

This episode shares an excerpt from one of these lessons, covering:

-What's actually happening in your body when you're stuck in fight-or-flight -How to manually activate your parasympathetic nervous system even when the external world is still chaotic -Two specific breathing techniques you can use anywhere to send your body the "all clear" signal -Grounding phrases for when your body has settled but your brain is still spinning.

Check out the full Everything is Terrible toolkit FREE on my Substack.

You can also:

• Read the blog post for this episode
• Learn about upcoming teacher retreats
• Join The Reset, a free at-home nervous system reset retreat June 26-28

When the world feels this heavy, this broken, it can feel almost frivolous to make space for art. And in the classroom with so much content to cover, can we really slow down enough to create and take an artful approach to learning with students? Who has time to write poems or pause over a beautiful image when we're al barely keeping our heads above water?

But think about what we're left with if we don't. If we strip away beauty and creativity and connection, all we have left is the grind. The compliance. The systems that are exhausting us in the first place.

I recently talked to Rebecca Bellingham and Veronica Scott about this. They're educators, writers, artists, and the co-founders of Artful Belonging Studio. They're also the authors of the new book, "The Artful Approach to Exploring Identity and Fostering Belonging." Listen as we discuss: What does an artful lesson look like when you have content standards to cover and no time? How do you do cultural heritage months in ways that invite all students in instead of making them feel obligated? And where should teachers start if they want to try this work?

Rebecca and Veronica brought so much warmth and wisdom to this conversation. Listen in. Or read the transcription here.

I picked up my phone to check the weather the other day, and twenty minutes later I was still standing in my kitchen, having bounced from app to app through a chain of perfectly legitimate tasks that I never actually chose to do in that moment. I wasn't scrolling mindlessly. I was checking my steps, signing up for a yoga class, responding to my husband's text, following up on a bank alert. And I still lost the thread of my own day.

That's what makes our relationship with phones so hard to examine. It's not all mindless scrolling. Our phones are genuinely useful tools, and that's exactly why we never put them down.

We've adapted so completely to being constantly tethered to our devices that we've forgotten what it feels like to have a mind that isn't always being filled with input. We reach for our phones in every spare moment, not because we need to, but because we have two minutes to kill and our brains have been trained to say "phone" before we've made a conscious decision.

Something interesting has shifted in recent years, too. A lot of us have pulled back from posting on social media, but we haven't pulled back from our phones. We've just become passive consumers instead of active participants, and the tethering hasn't loosened at all. I've explored this on my YouTube channel, So What Are We Doing Here, in two video essays I'll link in the show notes.

In this episode, I walk through three simple habits that have helped me reclaim my time and attention, habits I still have to practice every day. I'll share the most recent data on phone usage from the 2026 Reviews.org report, explain how our apps are engineered to keep us engaged through intermittent rewards, personalization, and instant gratification, and talk about why mindfulness, which just means paying attention to how you feel, is the foundation for lasting change.

I also share why I believe doing this work alongside our students is far more powerful than just enforcing phone policies at them. When students see that their teacher is honest about struggling with the same thing they do, it stops being about compliance and becomes about awareness and choice. I reference high school teacher Ashly Hilst's approach from Episode 306, where her message "Phones don't make good moments, people do" stuck with students in a way that traditional policies never had.

Whether you want to start with your own habits or bring this conversation into your classroom, this episode will give you a framework for helping yourself and your students take back control of how you spend your time and attention.

If you want to put these three habits into practice for yourself, I have a free 21-day Intentional Connectivity Challenge. It's one email per week for three weeks, each one focused on building one of these habits, with a follow-up check-in to help you stay on track.

If you want something more personalized, Motivation Lab is my coaching app that helps you understand how your brain works and build strategies that fit your natural tendencies. There's a module called Take Control of Your Phone Habits that walks you through exactly what I'm describing here, and it also covers motivation, focus, and procrastination, because our phone habits are tangled up with all of those things.

And if you want to bring this work into your classroom, my Finding Flow Solutions curriculum has a full unit on healthy phone habits with student journals, slideshows, and discussion activities that are no-prep for you. There are versions for elementary, middle, and high school.

Get the shareable article/transcript for this episode here.

We've been taught to think of the brain as the control center, the part of us that really matters for learning. But the body isn't just along for the ride, carrying our brains from place to place.

Caroline Williams, science journalist and three-time author (including of the book Inner Sense) has spent years digging into the research on how our brains and bodies actually work together. Turns out they're in constant conversation, sending signals back and forth in ways that shape how we think, feel, learn, and remember.

And that means the brain isn't calling all the shots from up there in your head: your body has a lot more to say than we've been giving it credit for.

Caroline and I talk about why we've been trained to override our body's signals, what happens when kids learn to tune in instead of push through, and how this changes what it means to teach the whole child.

This conversation might shift how you see everything from behavior issues to why certain kids struggle to focus. You'll learn:

• Why emotions don't actually start in your brain
• How body awareness connects to emotional intelligence and self-regulation
• What's really happening when we say "trust your gut"
• Why teaching kids to tune into their bodies might be one of the most important things we can do
• How understanding this changes the way we think about learning

If our bodies are constantly feeding information to our brains, then a lot of what we do in classrooms starts to make less sense...and there are easy, small shifts that can help.

Article/Transcript for this episode: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/the-brain-isnt-separate-from-the-body-heres-what-that-means-for-learning/

After 20+ years of creating exclusively for educators, I'm expanding into some new creative spaces.

In this podcast episode, I share the "why" behind my new YouTube channel ("So What Are We Doing Here?"), my Substack publication, my free guided meditations on Insight Timer, and some other fun new places to find me.

I also talk about how my own work has shifted more toward adults, and why so much of what I've always talked about on this podcast (productivity, mindset, burnout, boundaries) goes way beyond the classroom.

Then I get into something I've been wanting to demystify for a while: the restorative practices that are at the heart of my retreats. I break down what forest bathing, sound baths, and restorative yoga actually are, what the research says about why they work, and what it felt like to lead these sessions at my Books in the Wild retreat last month.

I also make a case for planning your year around restorative practices instead of around work, and using the concept of "due season" to build intentional periods of rest into your calendar before the busyness fills it up.

Truth for Teachers isn't going anywhere. But you're not JUST a teacher, and I want to create for ALL of you, not just the part of you standing in front of a classroom. Article/Transcript for this epsiode: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/so-what-are-we-doing-here-expanding-into-retreats-video-essays-mindfulness-and-more/

Retreats: https://dueseasonpress.com/ Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/AngelaWatson YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sowhatarewedoinghere Substack: https://angelaswatson.substack.com/ Motivation Lab: https://studio.com/apps/angela/motivationlab